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REF 2014 results are now out (effective 00:01, 18 December 2014), six years to the day since the last round.

There are many, many ways to calculate rankings from the data – GPA, “Gold Medals” and Market Share for example – but arguably one of the more convincing ones is Research Power. Calculations undertaken by colleagues here at the University of Nottingham show an interesting picture:

Research Power

Rank

Institute

1

University College London

2

University of Oxford

3

University of Cambridge

4

University of Edinburgh

5

University of Manchester

6

King’s (College) London

7

Imperial College London

8

University of Nottingham

9

University of Bristol

10

University of Leeds

11

University of Southampton

12

University of Glasgow

13

University of Sheffield

14

University of Birmingham

15

University of Warwick

16

Newcastle University

17

Cardiff University

18

Queen’s University Belfast

19

University of Durham

20

University of Liverpool

21

University of Exeter

22

Queen Mary University of London

23

University of York

24

London School of Economics and Political Science

Research Fortnight Research Power Rankings 2014

Research Fortnight has a similar list with pretty much the same positions but with some interesting swaps of places, especially at the top:

Research Fortnight 2014 Power Rank

2008 Rank

Institution

1

1

Oxford

2

3

UCL

3

2

Cambridge

4

5

Edinburgh

5

4

Manchester

6

6

Imperial

7

11

KCL

8

7

Nottingham

9

10

Bristol

10

8

Leeds

11

13

Southampton

12

9

Sheffield

13

14

Glasgow

14

15

Warwick

15

12

Birmingham

16

17

Newcastle

17

16

Cardiff

18

19

Durham

19

21

Queen’s Belfast

20

20

Queen Mary, London

21

25

Exeter

22

18

Liverpool

23

27

LSE

24

22

York

The headline from all of this is that the reason I have only included 24 spots in the table is because each of the first 24 places is taken by a Russell Group University. In some ways quite remarkable but probably not actually that surprising when you think about it given the nature of the institutions and historical patterns of resource allocation for research.